The (Extra)Ordinary Life of Abject Souls

The Word flows through us in innumerable ways. The first time I heard the name of Forough Farrokhzad, I immediately thought of our own Parveen Shakir. It was Dr. Sara Haq’s class on Gender, Sexuality, and Islam where she was mentioned. We were reading about resistance poetry written by Muslim women and Farrokhzad’s story fascinated us. It was the uncanny resemblance between her and Parveen Shakir’s life and death. To chart out the similarities between the two would only do injustice to the nuance of how we perceive them both. If two is enough to make a pattern, then the fact that one’s mention made us think of the other says something about the way in which the state and religio-patriarchal institutions look at artists who may be marginalized in some way. It is also interesting for me to think about how these two were not completely isolated from their own contexts. In fact, they were abject subjects who failed to assimilate into the status quo but their identities, struggles, and the expression that came out of it belonged to the very home that wanted to conveniently keep them out of the way. It makes me think of my own place in this country that I call home where my own desires as a queer person, my expression that does not fit the demands of the mainstream, and my religious identity as a Muslim are constantly at a battle to eat me up. I live under the gaze of a constant surveillance that never fails to remind me about staying in the lane so that I can be fit for living. It is a battle I have to fight on a daily base, especially in front of a class of high-school kids that look like indoctrinated machine guns - their eyes piercing through the colorful shirts, my hands full of rings, and my embellished lobes to the point of laying my soul bare with their whispers, smirks, and the remarks I hear later from somebody else. On their faces is only one simple question - What sort of a man is this?

I met Forough Farrokhzad again through an oracle deck. It was Taisia Kitaiskaia and Katy Horan’s The Literary Witches Oracle where Farrokhzad has a card of her own. She stands tall emerging out from a wall that has a door with an eye on it. The key word is ‘rebellion’. When I look at the card in a reading, all I see is someone emerging from belief systems and panopticons that would rather have us stay closed. The message here is clear - be larger than what holds you back, break down the eye and the walls that would have you stay small, express yourself unrelentlessly and unapologetically as who you are. It is not an easy message because to do what you owe to yourself requires courage. It is not easy when the cost can be as great as your life or losing the place and the people you call home. Most of us are content in living a life full of easy adjustments, in charting ways for ourselves that follows the pathway of what I call diplomatic survival. We cater to the whims of those who are privileged enough to be served with a silver spoon without asking for it. Each day fills us with bitterness that rages inside us but has no way out. The way out is also shunned because our expression is shunned. It is so ‘controversial’ and ‘out of the way’. Each day we come home to our own private havens and feel empty and exhausted. Each day we have to remind ourselves to be more gentle, to be more kind, to be more loving without losing ourselves in the process. Sometimes there are days when our eyes are filled with tears and we think of giving up. Yet, in all this, our courage and resilience never fails us. We wake up and tackle each ordinary day inspired by our own uniqueness amongst the silent crowd of eyes that keep following us. We spread it around and inspire those who may have lost hope. In the expression of our own authenticity, we create spaces for others to have faith in themselves and to believe that this life is more than the sum total of the voices that would have us doubt ourselves. This urge to speak, to express, to break open when others would have us rot uneaten is a responsibility and a rare gift. So we move on alongside death thinking of those that came before us, finding strength and inspiration in their words and the lives they lived, knowing that life is only too precious to be wasted away in the graveyard of ideas long dead. It reminds me of a couplet by the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz,

For when we stayed, we rose like massifs, and when we strayed, we left life far behind;

On the pathway to you beloved, every step we ever took became a memorial to your life

(Tr. by Mustansir Dalvi)

31.10.2023

Image: "Not to be Reproduced" by Rene Magritte